


to come

by pprfaith



Series: Wishlist 2013 [2]
Category: Twilight Series - All Media Types
Genre: Christmas, Community: wishlist_fic, F/M, No Plot/Plotless, Timestamp
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-03
Updated: 2013-12-03
Packaged: 2018-01-03 09:07:26
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,913
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1068663
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pprfaith/pseuds/pprfaith
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which vampires don't celebrate Christmas. Unless they do. A time stamp for a fic not yet archived here. Link inside.</p>
            </blockquote>





	to come

**Author's Note:**

> This will make zero sense without having head _Swansong_ first. [Here, have at.](http://pprfaith.livejournal.com/771.html)
> 
> Prompt: Childe_strife asked for _Twilight, Jasper/Bella, Swansong futurefic; Christmas_  
>  \- This might be horrible and also rot your teeth. Also, my head canon did another hit’n’run. Sorry.

+

 

To vampires, Christmas means nothing.

Unless you’re Alice Cullen, but Charlotte has never considered that pixy a real vampire. There is something wrong with an undead who prefers shoe shopping over a good hunt.

Thus Charlotte’s theory stands: to vampires, Christmas means nothing.

They are all older than many of the Christmas traditions of the twenty-first century. In their times, Christmas was a religious holiday, not a consumerist one. The decorations, the presents, the films and songs and tacky displays of love and affection don’t relate at all to their versions of Christmas. 

That is, if they remember them at all.

For Charlotte, Christmas as a human is a vague memory of more work. Her mother, she thinks, had a business, and it boomed around Christmas. She thinks of incense when someone mentions Christmas mass and that’s it.

Peter and Jasper feel pretty much the same. 

The only modern mindset in their clan is Swan, who’s never been normal. She dislikes presents as much as she dislikes anything else her generation should love.

So Christmas in the Whitlock household is small, bordering on non-existent. When they are around humans, they put up a tree by a convenient window, displaying enough cheer to keep the bloodbags from asking awkward questions. When they aren’t around humans, well. Peter has been known to tinsel-bomb random shrubs and trees, but that’s just her insane mate, not Christmas.

Occasionally, gifts will appear under the tree. Nothing big and never more than one per person. The new set of oil paints Charlotte didn’t buy for herself because they are perversely expensive. The tacky charms bracelet Swan looked at out of the corner of her eye. Random junk someone thought Peter would find hilarious. A guitar tuning kit for Jasper. 

Little things that say _family_ more than _pseudo Christian holiday_. 

Which is why it’s surprising to find Baby girl sitting cross-legged under the tree when they get home from a hunt, a stack of large envelopes with little bows on them in her lap.

She’s wearing one of Jasper’s shirts, her hair is a mess, and she stares at the front door and their return intensely enough to make Charlotte think there’s something going on. Jasper, leaning against the far wall and refusing to take his eyes off his mate, assures her that she’s right. 

Peter just smiles, busses a kiss along Swan’s scalp and makes for the shower. Mountain lion is fucking messy. 

Charlotte exchanges a look with her sire, who nods, shrugs, lets her go. 

Twenty minutes later, Swan hasn’t moved. Or blinked, probably. 

Jasper shifts to stand behind her, providing a backrest with his shins until Baby girl grabs him and pulls him down to the floor with her. He hits a tree branch going down and the decorations tinkle. Peter pulls Char into his lap.

“What’s up, bitches?” he asks, miming a finger gun.

Charlotte smacks him.

Swan shrugs. “I finished my thesis project last week,” she declares.

She’s been studying history for the past five years. Before that it was literature. She’s specialized, then and now, in the Civil War era, diving into both fact and fiction like she has something to prove, something to catch up on. Like she feels guilty for the hundred and fifty plus years Jasper lived alone because she wasn’t born yet.

Which, knowing her, is exactly why she’s become a Civil War fiend. 

It doesn’t explain the envelopes in her lap.

She shrugs by way of explaining her lack of explanation and passes the first one to Jasper, then Charlotte, then Peter. 

Neither of them move to open their gifts.

“What’s in there?” Peter asks. His tone of voice is quiet and resonant. He sounds that way when he almost – almost – knows something. But not quite. Not yet.

Swan smiles. “You. Your pasts. Your families. Everything I could dig up on what happened to them after you died. Even descendants. I dug it all up on my trip to Dallas last month. You can open it or not.”

She cocks her head to one side, smiles. Her golden eyes glow.

She already knows what they’ll do. 

Charlotte, who remembers only motherbusinessbrothersheat, puts the envelope down and hugs her sister tightly.

+

They disperse a little to open their gifts, but not far. Charlotte and Peter take the sofa, Jasper and Swan curl up in the far corner on the floor. Neither of them cares much for furniture. They prefer to tangle themselves into each other until they look like two contortionists in love. 

And Charlotte... Charlotte pulls out photocopy after photocopy, handwritten notes, neatly typed missives. 

She pulls out her mother’s face, her brothers in uniform, the nieces and nephews she never knew she had, their children and theirs and theirs. 

Her mother was a seamstress.

Charlotte was born in May. 

She was born in May and went missing in June twenty-two years later and only a dozen miles from the house she was born in. 

It’s strange, how far away those twelve miles seem and how small at the same time. She can run that far in seconds now. How many thousands and thousands of miles has she travelled since the day her wagon’s axle broke and death came for her with Jasper’s face?

She looks at her sire, finds him lying with his head in Swan’s lap, listening as she whispers all his life’s secrets to him. 

Behind Char, Peter runs a hand over a glossy copy of Charlotte Pierce, age seventeen. “You were cute.”

“I still am, thank you very much,” she announces, scowling only because she knows he wants her to. Like she needs it. Like something just happened here, something that can’t unhappen. 

It didn’t.

Somehow, the envelope didn’t change anything at all. Char remembers more now, but nothing that changes who she is, what defines her. Charlotte Pierce died a long time ago. What’s left now is Char, mate of Peter, childe of Jasper, sister of Swan.

The only thing she feels, is a touch of old grief at knowing that she had brothers and a mother who mourned her, never knowing the amazing, terrifying, brilliant second life she lives. 

“What did you look like as a kid,” she asks, tugging on Pete’s history. He shrugs, passes it to her, unopened. 

“Go ahead.” He grins. “I know everything important.”

Frowning, she puts the papers down on an end table. She’s not going to dig into her mate’s history without him. It’d feel too much like snooping, even though, God knows, that’s exactly what he’d do in her place. 

He waggles his eyebrows. She gives him a Look.

“Twins, right?” Swan asks across the room. “Boy and girl?”

Peter suddenly perks up.

“Yeah,” Jasper nods. “A lot younger than me. I... they had the same hair as me. And blue eyes.”

She grins at him and runs a hand through his dirty blonde curls. “As a kid, I always wanted twins. One boy, one girl. Perfect mixture of both their parents and...,” she blinks dazedly into the dim, warm lights of the tree, hands stilling on Jasper’s head.

He shifts so he can see her face and holds still, waiting her out. Personally, Charlotte finds it funny how much time she and Jasper spend waiting out their all-knowing other halves when they get like this. Seeing. Learning. 

She can feel Pete’s grin pressing into her shoulder as he watches the other half of their family intently. 

Swan’s hands resume their carding. “Who are Sophie and Adam?” she asks.

“Buzz buzz, goes the bee,” Peter murmurs into the skin of Charlotte’s neck.

“Mhm?”

“Baby girl’s feeling the pull again.”

The woman in question looks up at them. “Do you know...?”

Pete shakes his head. “Not yet. Maybe....”

“Probably. South of....”

“West. Probably. Water’s ....”

“No. We’ll have to move back to....”

“The house is clear. We can pull it out of hibernation after the holidays. Should be easy.”

She nods again, satisfied with some plan only she seems to fully understand yet. “Okay. Who are they?”

Charlotte remembers them, Adam and Sophie, Sophie and Adam, but only in a vague, washed-out way, horror and panic and pity all mixed-up. She only spent a year in Maria’s clutches and that year was mostly a haze of bloodlust and fear. 

Sophie and Adam were at the edges of all that, just another horror to add to the collection. 

Jasper, who has gone still, is the one to explain. Charlotte thinks, with a flash of viciousness she doesn’t like in herself, that it’s only right he be the one to confess. The twins are his sin, now and always. His crime, the same way Peter is, the same way Charlotte herself is.

Jasper isn’t that man anymore, isn’t the Warmaker, never really _was_ him, but it was still his hands that killed them all. Sometimes, briefly, she resents the fuck out of him for that. 

But it never lasts. 

Especially not when he does things like curl himself around Swan, his face pressed to her soft belly, his knees tucked behind her, like a little boy looking for shelter. He speaks into her skin. “Maria met the witch twins and wanted some of her own. She wasn’t... she wasn’t good and finding gifted, so she just took any twins she could find. Eventually, I brought her Sophie and Adam.”

“Why them?” Swan asks, out of all possible questions. Why them. Why not any other pair of twins?

“They were old enough not to be considered immortal children, but young enough to please Maria. I knew they would be gifted and I knew she’d stop test driving other children. It was neater.” 

Neater.

The slaughter of two children, for no other reason than to satisfy the whims of a madwoman. It was neater.

There is a long stretch of silence and Charlotte wonders if he feels regret, feels guilt. If he remembers how. 

“We’re fetching them,” Baby girl says, certain as the sunrise. Like she’s planning a grocery run.

“They’re still with Maria.”

“Yes.”

“She’ll have at least twenty newborns,” Charlotte points out. 

Swan shrugs, like she’s considered the concern and dismissed it. Pete nods wisely. “And we have an empath and a shield. Swan blocks, Jasper drops and all we have to do is collect heads.” He grins, sudden and fierce, “Betcha I can get more than you!”

“So we go after Maria?”

“We end it. All of it. Without her, there will be no more wars.” There it is again, that bone-deep certainty that sometimes terrifies Charlotte.

“Why now?” She asks, because she doesn’t have that absolute faith in the way the world spins. She needs to borrow some.

Another shrug from their baby. “It’s time,” she declares, as certain as she’s ever been. Bella, like Jasper, doesn’t waste time on insecurity. Both of them are solid as rock and doubtless as anything Charlotte has ever seen. 

Peter knows things, too, but he hedges and haggles with the way the world works. Swan never does and Jasper... Jasper wouldn’t know doubt if it climbed on top of him and planted a flag. 

It’s why Charlotte loves them both so much.

“Cool,” she declares, throwing a glance at the pictures spilling out of her envelope, her nieces and nephews, babies she never held. Two of the girls were named for her. “I always wanted to be an aunt.”

Maybe next year, they’ll have a reason to have a proper Christmas. 

+


End file.
